Well, I was planning on installing SUSE on my other system, but decided to try Fedora 6 on the same one instead. I did buy the several distributions at the same time in order to compare. The performance boost on this older system is noticeable. I guess because Fedora selects from a variety of kernels instead of using the 'one size fits all' method. But I've hit all sorts of configuration problems, including Matrox drivers. I managed to install the 'unofficial' drivers posted by this site. But even after putting '-ignoreABI' in all of the specified locations it won't load the ABI module. My system has all three of the config files mentioned in the tutorial, so I modified all three.

/etc/gdm/custom.conf
/etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc
/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers

So where else might this setting be effective? Exactly which manager does Fedora core 6 use?

Hmm, I see three copies of the same line:
/usr/sbin/gdm-binary -nodaemon

And this is really weird... when I turned the machine on to do this, the screen 'moved' again like it had when I got the ignoreABI switch working with SUSE. Something about the hard power down seems to have fixed the problem and it now loads and keeps the mga_hal module. Time to add the 'load dri' thing to xorg.conf and see if that works...

Hmm, before tinkering with xorg.conf I tried the OpenGL 3D screensavers. (No games on the system at present.) They work. Does that mean 3D acceleration is working? Or is it running OpenGL in software? How do I figure that out?

Something about the hard power down seems to have fixed the problem and it now loads and keeps the mga_hal module.

That's weird. Does your logfile state that the mga_hal module is now loaded?Can you verify, that your system doesn't suffer from memory or overheatingerrors?

Yes, I looked in the Xorg.0.log and there are no more (EE) lines about anything being unloaded. It does keep the mga_hal now. And as I already posted, OpenGL 3D works. I just don't currently have any 3D games to test it with. Maybe I can find GTK Pool quick and install that.

Well, at present I don't have any 3D games so I'm not sure if the 3D is working. But I am concerned that the full potential of the video cardis not being used. It shows as '8192' kbytes of Video Ram in the log instead of 16384 -- it does have the expansion installed. Is there some way to make the driver recognize this extra memory? Log attached.

Alright, that looks better. Regarding your logfile, even DRI initialization looks
just fine as well as the connection to the mga kernel module.

Does that mean 3D acceleration is working? Or is it running OpenGL in software? How do I figure that out?

You could try to use the `glxinfo` command and provide the output of this
command here. It'll show wheter your OpenGL gets rendered in hard- or
software.

Regarding the VideoRam issue:
You could try to use the option 'VideoRam' in your device section to increase
it, but I don't know if that'll work if Xorg is unable to query to real amount of
VideoRam. This option goes into the Device section:

I had to move in the fall of 2007 and didn't get back to this machine for a long time. We're up to Fedora 11 now. When I tried to start it, I found that the G200 video card had died! No detectable reason. But there is no video signal from that card now. Argh! After all that effort to get the drivers working. Ah, well. It's a pretty old & pathetic system now. An old Millenium card (with no 3D of course) makes it still usable. I might install Knoppix to the disk just to have a native OS on it. It could still be useful as a server of some sort, or an emergency backup for getting email when all other systems are down for some reason.